As the spring semester of my junior year came to a close, I was craving adventure, new experiences. But my options felt limited. I didn’t want to live at home for the summer before my senior year of college, and I didn’t want to stay in the small town Albion, Michigan where I go to school at Albion College.

In order to stay sane amongst the cornfields of Albion and endless stacks of homework, I escape to Ann Arbor, Michigan where I have a large and intertwining group of friends. But when I lived there and called that city my home for the summer, it was a different experience than just passing through it.

I struck up a deal with my mom where she would help me with living expenses if I kept up with writing and researching my passion– environmental writing, specifically climate change.

She’s awesome, needless to say.

During the summer, my ears were tuned for anything related to climate change. I would often hear my friends say stuff like “Man, this weather has been weird.”; “Duude! The polar vortex is back, in summer.“; “Did you hear about that east coast hurricane?”; “This thunderstorm is freaking me out.”

I think many of those questions and statements were rhetorical, internal thoughts slipping out, word vomit. But I started chatting at them about how their thoughts were actually rooted in something important–climate change. All the sudden, climate change became something personal to them.

The climate is in a pretty sticky situation, or rather, we are in a sticky situation because the climate is changing.

And to make matters more complicated, news, social media, and academics are throwing all sorts of different information about climate change around, creating a racket that is impossible to think over, let alone form your own opinions.

The Climate Pickle is not about saving the earth; it will be fine. Instead, this blog is about and for the human.To breathe life into the cold hard facts of climate science so that they walk around in your imagination, speak to you, and appear in your own life.

We, the young twenty-somethings, college-aged peeps, Millennia’s or whatever, know what it’s like to be human, to feel, to breathe. We might not all be on the same life-path, but we do have something in common.

Our parents and grandparents have passed to us a legacy, and said, “eh, climate change isn’t our problem. There is plenty of time. We’ll pass it onto the next generation. We’re busy, okay?”

We are all so wrapped up in our own lives, trying to survive school and work, balancing sleep and social lives, and planning our futures that we put the climate pickle low on our list of things to do.

The Climate Pickle is a place where you can jump right into that gooey mess like a pool of honey and roll around in it, to get a feel for the current climate chaos.

It’s the Millennia’s hub of information on the sticky situation of the climate pickle.